I never said up vote a comment, I said upvote the answer. You've not read my comment... "If you want to credit someone, upvote the person that posted the answer on the question that yours is a duplicate of" — Larnu1 min ago

". I don't find someone who missed the N prefix in an international context, especially Arabic where letters display differently depending on their position in the word, to be a dupe of someone who doesn't know what the N prefix is or how it's used." Then it's a typographical error, and your question should have been closed as such. You out the N in one place, and forgot it in another. As you say you know what the N stands for you know that missing it out is a typo, and those are off topic for SO. That leaves you defending that typographical errors are on topic for SO..? — Larnujust now

Thanks for the warning. I thought I was in the ok zone as I mention my affiliation, the project is open source and there is no ads on the page. My goal is to make it known to users potentially benefitting of it. Now that I am aware of the open source advertising program, I'll have a look at it. — lbovet37 secs ago

@larnu But I don't believe and don't agree the other question is a duplicate so why on earth I would upvote the answer on the other question!? I searched for 'Arabic' and 'Like' and the other question didn't show up. I won't search for N because it's NOT in my mind. I am missing it. That's the whole point. It seems people are too focused on the N prefix. I am focused on the Arabic language and its syntax. The other question has ZERO mention of 'Arabic' and therefore will never come up in the search. If my question was a dupe of the other, then BOTH should come up in the search. — Tony_Henrich5 secs ago

@Guedez: I'm asking myself the very same question at the moment. My question doesn't have any answers, yet, and it is unlikely that it will. I've gone a different way altogether and used a different DB engine, which got me out of trouble. — 4ndy1 min ago

@EliTheHuman yes, that's exactly the problem. The low-hanging fruit, which is where newbs gain proficiency in explanation, has been plucked clean, so there's no ramp up for new members to gain nontrivial rep. The assumption built in, which is entirely wrong, is that expertise is a rare commodity and answers should be hoarded. Utter nonsense - expertise arises to fill a need. Eliminating the need means the expertise never develops. — Jon Kiparsky56 secs ago

@krillgar there you're pointing to the "discussion is evil" position that's built in to SO. The "I sprang from my father's forehead with all of this knowledge, what's wrong with these peasants that they couldn't have managed to do the same?" attitude. Ever so helpful, wonderful to have it hard-coded in the site. — Jon Kiparsky1 min ago

The complete list of SE sites is here. This is the meta for SO, which is one specific site. It's probably not the best place to try to find recommendations for other sites in the network. — ivarni11 secs ago

Why do you assume that? Anyway, the real reason for the deletion was that it is a distraction, whether you want to label it as "orthogonal to the question", "off-topic", "a red herring" or "a tin of kidney beans". If you really think that the topic of that answer is actually worth discussing, you could always ask a question about (um) whether StackOverflow moderators have an issue with personal pronouns policy. (I can't see the point in doing that, but ... its a free world :-) — Stephen C42 secs ago

I support this request. Without making it obvious to users that they are review-banned, they are just going to keep reviewing incorrectly without knowing what went wrong, and I'm just going to keep doubling the suspension period to make a point. — Samuel Liew ♦1 min ago

How did this answer gather so many downvotes so quickly? Especially given that it is basically in line with the other (upvoted) answers, it would be nice to get some comment on why this is considered bad. — luator1 min ago

SO isn't a service that guarantees you a perfect free solution to any and all problems, regardless of what input you provide. Nobody here is obliged to try to reason through your problem to find you the answer. If it took you several days to figure it out, and you had access to the entire code and toolchain, how can we figure it out with a fraction of the information? Sometimes you're lucky and tickle the right connection in somebody's brain with the information you provide, but that's not a guarantee or a right. — deceze ♦12 secs ago

I had a look at some tag names before suggesting this. There's a ton of other tags prefixed with company names, such as oracle-, ibm-, microsoft-. There's also several software products out there named "Quantum", so I'm thinking that just quantum would be very ambiguous. However, I'll settle for quantum if the moderators feel it's sufficient. — Mig826 secs ago

@lutor I suppose many people full of hate and have too many reputations to waste. Unfortunately instead of using theirs to promote they are doing the opposite. Trust me when this abusive behavior starts taking hold, it's a prediction that this site is dying soon. — francogrexjust now

@code11 The graph show the number of question with each point being a month (if I read the query properly), so it looks like February 2017 did the all time record of questions per month :) — Tensibai18 secs ago

I can confirm that this (the issue I reported) is fixed as of rev 2020.2.18.36083. The hover behaviour appears to be fixed too - though I couldn't reproduce it on my mobile device due to lack of ability to hover (I always clicked). — Wai Ha Lee1 min ago

Tried to make the question less opinionated by emphasizing that there is no strict right or wrong and the aim is to get a collection of features and how they likely look like if you compare with existing big social networks. That should make the question answerable and anyway every discussion includes opinions to some extent. — Trilarion42 secs ago

@TravisJ "I don't think we need more social network features at Stack Overflow." That's fine. I'm more interested in knowing what this social network features would be that we don't need. What do we not need? — Trilarion1 min ago

@DalijaPrasnikar "Turning any repository of knowledge into social platform..." But isn't it already a social platform to some extent? People engage with each other, there are profiles, the content is produced by the users, there is even a community of some sort. That are all characteristics of social platforms. — Trilarion1 min ago

Considering that all of Microsoft's Documentation is on GitHub now, a Feedback Item on the page would seem appropriate. SO isn't the place for the questions Microsoft is saying should be asked. Not sure what community would be, if any, but certainly not here. — Larnu13 secs ago

I think the Wikipedia-like aspect of SO is somewhat gone by now. It's slowly turning into a personalised solve-my-problem site anyway. What's necessary is a clear direction. Is SO "saturated", and the only sensible new content is personalised help, so turning it into a one-on-one social model makes sense? Then we can think about what that might look like. Or should we try to "turn back the tide" and re-focus on the Wikipedia goal? Or perhaps both, with some sort of spinoff or mix? — deceze ♦2 mins ago

@deceze Even for Wikipedia, which has the knowledge base goal, they think about adding more social elements, so maybe it's not detrimental if done right. But what is wrong with first looking what it would look like and then deciding if it makes sense? What is a one-one-one social model? Maybe classes and tutors? Graduate of the Stack Overflow Java beginners class of 2020. — Trilarion53 secs ago

@ivarni I did, during at least five days, this is why I wrote "keep looking for". I don't know why you think I didn't. After that I thought that it might be a good idea to look for help. — Falken1 min ago

@TravisJ Well, I don't like personal attacks and I was trying to be diplomatic. I don't know what it proves. I am not sure I get your point but no worry, no one here seems to understand my concern or point of view anyway, I got it, sorry for the disruption. — Falken1 min ago

Ok i explain: you want to ask a question with a mysql, tag. So you go to that tag and look what questions have 0 or more points and see how people ask their question. there you also read the comments, when something is missing or has to be improved, we will tell it. You can also check questions which are closed and see why it was closed. Some people have a talent to ask a good question, some people have to work hard to get there. And as final point, When you write your question down, take a step back, and read it as if you never heart of it. Put yourself in the shoes of the reader. — nbk34 secs ago

@deceze We completely agree, and I find your answer slightly offensive. Maybe my message was slightly offensive too but it was not my goal, sorry if it was. Fortunately I did not blame anyone for not helping me or not providing an answer. You wrote "Sometimes you're lucky and tickle the right connection in somebody's brain with the information you provide". That's exactly why I tried to ask my question on SO but obviously this kind of question does not match the site rules. I think it's regrettable but that's just my point of view and I couldn't see anyone agreeing. So, time to move on for me. — Falken1 min ago

@lundin: "The site is rapidly dying since September" Eh? By what metric? Visits are up, traffic is up, bandwidth is up, questions are up, answers are up... How do you define the site as "rapidly dying"? — Geoff Griswald5 secs ago

A lot of the site's problems stem from over-moderation. Questions being closed as dupes that aren't really dupes, discussion being "moved to chat" instead of being encouraged, and so on. It strikes me that the balance of mods to users was out of whack on SO, and the mods all have the abundance of self-importance issues that normally arise on a platform like this. A good purge of them will go a long way to making the site more user-friendly imo. — Geoff Griswald2 mins ago

Kind of irrelevant, you can pay for your search results to appear higher on Google, and there are various tricks you can employ to make your search rank higher. I imagine SO doesn't bother with those tricks, and doesn't pay for page ranking. Quite frankly, if being the top link on Google matters to a user, then that user is too dumb to care about. Being on the first page is an achievement in itself. — Geoff Griswald1 min ago

Doubtful. I could not care less about this latest drama. The reasons for it have nothing to do with the site, the approach to answering questions here or the approach to moderation. It has everything to do with the current political climate, drama for drama's sake, and a mistaken impression that the moderators are more important than they really are, and can force the site admins to do stuff. Who cares. Let it blow over, let the babies throw their toys on the ground and just ignore them. — Geoff Griswald13 secs ago

Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest wolf you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly… stupid. — Cerbrus53 secs ago

@GeoffGriswald I take it you don't hang out on meta much? :) Summary here. Moderators and veteran users are leaving, veteran staff is fired, all trust in the company running the site is obliterated. — Lundin55 secs ago

"The revenue of the platform is created from the engagement between users" — I don't think that's true. Most revenue comes from ad revenue which is mostly generated by anonymous visitors coming from Google, with other revenue generated by Jobs and auxiliary services, which are mostly advertised through the presence of SO on Google search results. "Interaction" only generates revenue indirectly insofar as it generates valuable content. The "interaction" part of it is not really relevant though. It's not like Facebook which you visit because you want to interact with others. — deceze ♦16 secs ago

Overall, I'm not sure what the purpose of this would be. I'm not here to engage with my "favourite programmers" or something. It's the questions which are fun to answer. I couldn't care less who wrote them, I would not want to "follow" anyone personally. If anything, I'm following technologies, which is what SO already does. — deceze ♦37 secs ago

@deceze I clarified that the revenue is only indirectly based on the engagement of users. I tend to agree with seeing personal relationships with other programmers here as not very helpful, but mostly because there are other social networks like LinkedIn for example that already do it and would probably do it so much better. It would be mostly superfluous. — Trilarion30 secs ago

What I'm actually starting to see more and more, is users answering questions, NOT as ANSWERS, but as comments. I've asked a few question's in recent months, and the answers (or possible answers) have all been comment based, and in my last question I even asked to commenter, if they would expend on their idea in a full answer and got no response. I suspect the thinking is, bad answers will loose me points, bad comments will not, or something like that. — shawty14 secs ago

It's funny, while looking up the definition I did stumble across an article on how the definitions of words are garbage everywhere citing that rimshot isn't a basketball term, and yet I also came across multiple sites saying it was...the more you know — Nick A1 min ago

@deceze Even if it goes into "personal help desk" direction, that would not be enough to call SO social network, nor would adding social networking features add value to such SO. — Dalija Prasnikar11 secs ago

Well, posting a question and hoping to get an answer is somewhat like throwing spaghetti at the wall, maybe they'll stick, maybe they'll just fall flat. You're not guaranteed to get help, you can't expect to get help, you can't insist on getting help. The better a question you post the better the chances you might be tickling the right neurone somewhere. But if it didn't, then complaining about it afterwards is received as somewhat offensive to the regulars here. Learn from it what you can, and post a better question next time. — deceze ♦7 secs ago

@Lundin But still. Missing trust doesn't seem to directly translate into less answers, questions, new users or visitors. At least the "rapidly" seems wrong. If it dies, it will die slowly, I guess. — Trilarion5 secs ago

S.O. has a number of lame, annoying, puerile, childish policies that annoy a certain percentage of the most high-quality providers of answers and questions. I only deal in the most difficult questions and answers in a couple of fields. And you can clearly see that, in certain cases, of the handful of top experts - a number of them now can't be bothered with the site. (Perhaps this could be quantified somehow, IDK.) — Fattie1 min ago

@Shree It doesn't matter what the content of your custom mod flag is, the mods have no way of knowing that there is a flag for NSFW content in the flag queue, you'll just have to be patient — Nick A1 min ago

@leonheess, there's no need for that. The OP has flagged something with best intent and has come here to query why it hasn't been processed yet, on the (perfectly understandable!) assumption that a flag for NSFW content would be handled quickly. Mocking their grammar is not ok. Shame on you! — Rob2 mins ago

If you flag something as being NSFW it doesn't help to provide a link to that content in meta as you are now exposing other users to viewing that content in an environment that may not be appropriate. — Joe W2 mins ago

@deceze Please, show me where I have complained about not getting help or not getting an answer. I would feel bad to complain about that on any website. I am discussing here a behaviour that I don't appreciate and which is not at all about the help I received or not afterward. Here I tried (and obviously failed) to convey my reservations and start a discussion about the regular users definition of what a good question is. I thought that my story would be a good starting point for a fact-based discussion but everyone think that I am ranting for the pleasure of ranting. Therefore... — Falken1 min ago

@Falken many of my questions haven't been solved, it's just a matter of fact. It's not a personal attack or offense, it's because I asked a question that was very niche and would require a deep dive, or I'm using a language not as popular on SO, or I asked late at night when the activity is lower than normal. What you can do is keep editing until people feel a re-open vote is acceptable, but claiming offense where none is had won't really do much to help you out unfortunately. — Sterling Archer1 min ago

After looking at your question, and knowing a decent bit of python, I can already say it's going to be hard to get a good answer for your question. It's very library heavy, and not a common solution. But I hope you find your answer soon! — Sterling Archer1 min ago

I kindly disagree of you regarding "You're going to have to live with that from time to time.". I still think SO must do something about it once we put some effort on give a good and clear answer and has no feedback is very disappointing. Ask for a up vote or accept as an answer should be a flag option. — Marcelo Filho1 min ago

I have the same feeling, if you post something here that might not too clear or in the square frame of these haters you will get tons of down votes very fast and not even a descent comment to help you improve the post. Its very sad! — Marcelo Filho1 min ago

@SterlingArcher That's what I did, I asked a "very niche" question as you say. And it should be acceptable to post niche question on SO. It should be fine having potentially hard, unanswered questions flying around. I am perfectly fine to wait for one month before getting an answer because my question is niche and lacks an easy example but it was closed in a matter of minutes without even having a chance to be read and answered by others. Thank you very, very much for your positive message anyway! — Falken53 secs ago

Note that I've had wait times for up to about two weeks on a custom flag, and as said previously, there's no way to prioritize custom flags. Expecting it to be handled in a couple of hours is just unrealistic — Erik A57 secs ago

@deceze My mistake then, it was a 'why' to open an objective discussion but I failed to convey that. Proper communication on the Internet is not easy. But to be honest, now I really don't feel like I will ever open a new question to try to discuss that again. I guess I will just post this kind of question elsewhere. I realised I am clearly not involved enough in the SO community to start (even less lead) this kind of discussion. — Falken39 secs ago

I don't understand why there are two downvotes and why this question was flagged. I would have closed that question, because it needs more detail or fcus. But that is nothing to flag about. If you don't like it, write a dcomment so that the user understands what he can make better the next time. I also hate downvotes without any comment. — nbk15 secs ago

You're leaving the entire site just because of this one discussion? I feel like that's an overreaction. By all means, take some time out to clear your head if you need to, but please don't leave the site just because you were politely asked to be patient about something. — F1Krazy1 min ago

Actually a Community can't be an amalgamation of a bunch of high brow no do gooders. This is what is happening all across. "Don't agree with the point of view, just kill it" has been how the "regulars" are behaving. For me basically they are sore losers. Just reminds me - Good Riddance Monica. — 1237909544 secs ago

There is no priority queue in the flag queue. All flags go on the same pile, waiting for a mod to handle them. On working days I believe 1000 new flags get created. With the reduced number of mods that need to handle those it can take awhile. It doesn't matter if your flag is about NSFW, plagiarism or a live or dead situation, they get handled when a mod gets the flag in the queue. If you can't wait that long you might try to chat with a mod and ask them to check your pending flags. Do know that not all rooms allow you to ping a mod, nor do all mods respond well to being invited to a chatroom. — rene37 secs ago

@Lundin Yes, you could be right. Higher quantity could mean lower quality but jumping to rapidly dying would still be a stretch, I'd say. The numbers alone don't indicate a fast downward trend. Do people visit Reddit now? — Trilarion1 min ago

I'm not entirely sure why this is getting downvoted. There's a lot of misconceptions that can be cleared up here, and in all fairness, not everyone has seen or known about what happened from Meta Stack Exchange and how it permeated all the way over here. — Makoto1 min ago

@Trilarion - The features we need less of here are already incorporated through third party anyway. The system was not designed to support user coordination outside of the Q&A format. — Travis J1 min ago

"user comment edits/deletes merely apply a "strike-through" to the original text" seems like it would make things much harder to read, and isn't really a standard anywhere else. I don't really agree that is a good idea. — Travis J9 secs ago

Scandal wasn't related as much to the Code of Conduct so much as the corporate response of stomping out any criticism of it both internally and externally. Also, no one was rehired. It was just a mass exodus of talent that has left us with a group that I cannot even criticize or my comment will be removed. — Travis J1 min ago

This site's raison d'etre is not to permit users to have a conversation, it's to permit questions to be answered. Comments are always going to be secondary to that and once there is a good answer or set of good answers ought to be mostly obsolete and therefore removable. — Robert Longson1 min ago

"I consider considerably harmful for the clarity and integrity of the comments for a given question, that they can be edited/deleted by the user at a later time." Just to make sure: you understand that this later time is a five minutes period, after which comments cannot be edited yes? In other words, in five minutes from now I will be unable to edit this comment, while retaining the ability to delete it. — Félix Gagnon-Grenier1 min ago

Definitely an issue. Historically MSDN has generated a decent amount of link rot. Sometime you can find them in the web archive (archive.org) and use those links. Other times, you are just out of luck. — Travis J12 secs ago

Sigh. Microsoft has done it again. When will their system administrators learn that cool URIs don’t change? Yes, there are likely thousands of broken links to Microsoft blogs in SO posts, along with hundreds of links to Microsoft Connect (which were broken some time back by the obsoleting of Connect with no archive), and thousands of links to MSDN documentation that does not properly redirect to its new home. What do we do? I don’t know. URL rewriting with a bot may be an option for SE staff, but that requires we can find a stable mapping. Unlikely. — Cody Gray ♦17 secs ago

Yes, we will read the comments, so we better make sure they really are important. Any clarification should be integrated into the post. Any question about details should result in an action in the post. — Félix Gagnon-Grenier1 min ago

To make my point more clear: if I'm seeking an answer, and I find the question already asked, but not yet answered, yet I see bunch of comments that half of them I don't understand because they are referring to deleted,/edited comments, then they loose their value altoghether — Áron Várhelyi21 secs ago

I think I understand @ÁronVárhelyi. In practice, I think we are trying to express to you that it really does not happen that much and that you can flag leftover clients. If you have concrete examples, maybe you can edit links towards those examples in your question? — Félix Gagnon-Grenier20 secs ago

Well I cant pinpoint examples, because the matter is somewhat summation of my experience, and unfortunately I get this a lot. The solution seems not to be to "flag the rest of the comments" and delete it. Than you take the effort of the people making the comments in vain. Than again, relevant comments are not deleted, but nonetheless they remain obscure if they add on a previous comment (as I said comments are interrelated, as one does not repeat what already has been said) — Áron Várhelyi1 min ago

@PanthersFan92 Downvotes never mean "you've been a bad boy". They aren't an attack against you. Their meaning can be determined by reading the tooltip on the downvote arrow. They mean either that a question does not show any research effort, that it is unclear, or that it is not useful. For an answer, they mean either that the answer is unclear, not relevant, or technically incorrect. The system is fine. Downvotes don't have anything to do with condescension. They are a content rating system. — Cody Gray ♦1 min ago

@cod You're a mod with gzillion reputation points. As a low reputation user my experience is different. For example, recently I had a question down-voted (and voted for closure) by many people for "lack of effort" and received tons of condescending comments. I managed to solve my own question and ended up with a positive rating at the end after I started a meta post about the question. It has nothing to do with content quality and everything to do with shutting down new people. When more than 90% of the questions have negative scores than something is wrong. — PanthersFan92just now

Well, if debating and clarifying the question is vital to understanding and answering it, than definitely yes. After all, if only the question and the answer matter, and the people producing the answer and their comfort or at least making their job a little easier, yet the clients reading the question does not matter, than the whole thing somewhat shoots himself in the foot... — Áron Várhelyi38 secs ago

@CodyGray You're a mod with gzillion reputation points. As a low reputation user my experience is different. For example, recently I had a question down-voted (and voted for closure) by many people for "lack of effort" and received tons of condescending comments. I managed to solve my own question and ended up with a positive rating at the end after I started a meta post about the question. It has nothing to do with content quality and everything to do with shutting down new people. When more than 90% of the questions have negative scores than something is wrong. — PanthersFan921 min ago

In the meantime, fixing the links (if possible) as you come across them is valid. You could maybe do a few edits for posts that are highly upvoted and/or get a lot of traffic but you don't want to flood the Active page with these edits unless folks decide it's worth a group effort to fix all of these posts (like a burnination request). — BSMP28 secs ago

@PanthersFan92 In the case of "condescending comments", please flag these for moderator attention. However, it is not surprising that a question would be downvoted for a lack of research effort; that is one of the normal downvoting reasons shown on the tooltip message. I'm glad that you were able to solve your own problem, but that doesn't make your claims true. Downvotes are not about shutting anyone down. They're about ranking content. That new users are less likely to post content that meets Stack Overflow's quality standards is a correlation, not causation. — Cody Gray ♦48 secs ago